At times in Christian thought, the priorities of pure doctrine and passionate mission have been perceived as opposites on a spectrum where emphasis on one results in neglect of the other, but without one, the other is deficient and doomed to crumble. Mission without doctrine is like a body without a skeleton, but apart from mission, doctrine is like dry bones in a museum. A Lutheran Reformission maintains a dual emphasis, resulting in doctrinal missions as well as missional doctrine.

Thursday, November 26, 2015

For this week's newspapers, I answered a question about the Good Samaritan and Syrian Refugees:

Q: Does the Bible offer any
principles about what the U.S. Government policy should be on whether to take
refugees from Syria and the Middle East?
Are the parable of the Good Samaritan or the Old Testament laws
regarding treatment of foreigners relevant to the question?

While many people might read the
parable of the Good Samaritan as a moral lesson about charity and how a person
should respond to others in need, it is actually about much more. While it certainly is good to help those who
are suffering (which other passages of Scripture reveal), the parable is, first
and foremost, about Jesus Himself. In
the parable, the character of the Good Samaritan is not a president or a
senator. In fact, the character of the
Good Samaritan is not even any ordinary human.
The Good Samaritan is Jesus!

And the character in the parable that
represents humanity is not even the priest or the Levite, but instead, the
victim is the character in the parable which plays our role. Jesus, the Good Samaritan, comes down into
our uncleanness to cure and heal us, completely apart from our worthiness or
ability to repay. Understanding this
reality completely changes how we approach the parable and rules out its
application to a government’s acceptance of refugees, unless we want to suggest
that the Government or the president are our savior.

Many who have attempted this
application have also made reference to a handful of Old Testament laws
regarding the treatment of foreigners. The
difficulty with this attempt is that those laws were not universal laws given
to humanity, but rather, they were given particularly to the nation of
Israel. So, if we were to suggest that
these laws carry over into the present day, rather than being fulfilled in
Jesus, we would have to apply them not to the United States Government, since
it is not constituted by God or committed to serving Him, but rather to the
Church.

Probably the most relevant passages
of Scripture in relation to this issue are the New Testament sections that describe
the role of government, particularly in Paul’s Epistles. In these passages, the role of Governments
which are not Ancient Israel is consistently described as being to provide
safety and stability to their citizens.
The Church, then, has the role of helping those in need under the
umbrella of that stable and secure nation.

So, in the present circumstances, the
Government’s role is to do whatever is in the best interest of our nation’s
security, even if it is not the most humanitarian choice for those outside of
our borders, because its duty is to its own citizens. If it comes down to helping people from other
parts of the globe with the result of incurring a substantial risk to its own
citizens’ safety, or providing security to its own citizens while denying help
to non-citizens, our government’s Biblically-mandated priority is to protect
its own citizens.

The Church’s role, on the other hand,
is to help those in need. So, if our
government should choose to allow the entry of refugees, then Christians are
called to demonstrate the Lord’s mercy by helping those who arrive on our
shores. If the government determines the
threat to our security is too great, then we are still able to provide help
through the hands of our fellow Christians and their Churches in the parts of
the world where the refugees find a home.

The government has its own particular
God-given role, and the Church has its own, but as we address these
circumstances, it is important to distinguish those roles and apply the proper
scriptures to the proper roles as we seek Biblical answers to the questions at
hand.

Monday, November 9, 2015

For this week's newspapers, I answered a question about the alleged contradictions between the teachings of Jesus and Paul:

Q: Do St. Paul’s writings in the
Epistles of the New Testament contradict the things that Jesus said as recorded
in the Gospels? Did Paul add to or alter
Jesus’ message when he was writing to the churches, and what gave him authority
in those churches if he was not a follower at the time of the Resurrection?

This is a recurring accusation during
the most recent two centuries of Christianity:
That Paul’s teachings in the epistles do not align with the things said
by Jesus during our records of His earthly life and ministry. The exact accusation often varies, with those
on one end of the spectrum accusing Paul of being too doctrinal in comparison
to their perception of Jesus as a free spirit whose ministry centered on
helping people, and those on the other end of the spectrum accusing Paul of
being too lenient regarding matters of the Law—whether those found in the Old
Testament or matters of personal holiness—while they believed Jesus to have been
more strict about these things.

Usually this kind of response to the
content of the New Testament results in a person diminishing portions of the
New Testament in favor of others, rather than trying to reconcile the
statements and understand the original intent of Jesus speech or Paul’s writing
to discover that they actually do agree.
When it falls short of outright rejection of Paul’s epistles or other
New Testament books, this kind of approach to Jesus and Paul usually results at
the very least in some imaginative story-telling to explain how the early
Church came to a unanimous consensus regarding Paul’s letters if they are
actually so far removed from Jesus’ teachings.

One way in which it is often quite
simple to reconcile the teachings of Jesus and Paul that seem to contradict on
the surface is to dig deeper into what they are actually communicating. Since most readers in this part of the world
are limited to reading Scripture in English, we sometimes forget that Jesus did
not speak and Paul did not write in English, but we are reading a translation
of their words. In translation, there
are often not direct equivalents for the words being translated, and English
often cannot convey the time and duration as precisely as Greek did. So, even if we have the most accurate
translation possible, a reader might understand the English word differently
than the translator intended to use it, or we may miss that a particular
statement was made only for a particular circumstance while another was made as
a standing, universal proclamation. The
majority of contradiction accusations I see can be solved in this way, and even
for those who do not have access to original language training, looking at a
verse in multiple reliable English translations sometimes clarifies the intent
of the passage.

Another difficulty for those who
propose a contradiction is that the New Testament itself describes that the 11
original disciples of Jesus had access to Paul’s letters, and they examined him
and his message, ultimately endorsing him and approving that He was proclaiming
the same thing as they had learned from Jesus.
Likewise, we have no record that any person at the time of the writing
or in the following century ever proposed that there was a problem between Paul’s
teachings and the things said and done by Jesus. Instead, it was universally understood that
Paul was writing explanation to the churches about what the life, death, and
resurrection of Jesus accomplished and how they were to apply this to life in
their congregations.

When the New Testament is read with
care to understand the original meaning the authors intended and the history is
taken in full perspective, it becomes exceedingly clear that Paul was, in fact,
proclaiming the same message as Jesus and pointing people to the authentic
Jesus and not to some new formulation that was hijacking Jesus for other
goals.

Questions may be submitted by email to revjpeterson@stjohnsburt.org or sent
to P.O. Box 195; Burt, IA 50522.

Lutheranism is more than a cultural identity or a denominational label. In fact, this cultural and institutional baggage may be the primary obstacle in Lutheranism’s path.

To be a Lutheran is not dependent on a code of behavior or a set of common customs. Instead, to be a Lutheran is to receive Jesus in His Word, Body, and Blood for the forgiveness of sins in the Divine Service; and to be bearers of this pure Truth to a broken world corrupted with sin, death, and every lie of the devil and man’s own sinful heart.

While the false and misleading ideas of human religious invention are appealing to sin-blinded minds, they fail when exposed to the realities of life. It is tragic when souls are led to confusion and despair because of the false religious ideas with which they are surrounded. The Biblical doctrine taught by the Apostles and restored at the Reformation holds answers which are relevant regardless of time or place and offers assurance of forgiven sins and eternal life who all who believe its message.

I am a husband, a father, the pastor of St. John’s Lutheran Church (LCMS) in Burt, IA, and track chaplain at Algona Raceway.